Shared, Dedicated, or Cloud Hosting Which Hosting is the best?

Whether you’re running a small eCommerce website, a simple food ordering app, an enterprise system, or the next Facebook, once your project is ready and your name domain is picked, you will face this question. 

What kind of hosting should I use?

There is no single right answer that works for all projects and all clients. What is best for your project could be the worst for another. For so many different factors, each of which includes several technical terms that sound like gibberish with random characters and numbers.

We’ll try to oversimplify the process in plain English with minimal techy terms.  But first, let’s list our options.

To make things a bit easier, we’ll assume the new project doesn’t have tens of thousands of users waiting for your site/app to go live, or thousands of users will use the app at once in the near future. Let’s worry about handling this huge traffic when we see it.

Our options:

       #1 Shared Hosting

       #2 VPSs or Dedicated servers

       #3 Cloud hosting

#1 Shared Hosting

It’s suitable for blogs,  news, promotional, and small eCommerce sites. In shared-hosting your project will be sharing the hosting service with dozens of other sites. This means CPU, Memory, and network bandwidth will be shared. So be aware of this.

Pros

- Very cheap ~(2-8$/moth)

- Fixed cost every month

- Easy to use

- Security and backups managed by the hosting company

Cons

- None or minimal control over installed software

- Low performance 

- No scaling 

- Might be slow. As a result, your website will have a bad score by search engines like Google, and won't provide a very pleasant experience for your users/customers

In case your site suddenly got too much traffic, the site will stop responding, or even worse. The hosting company may block it entirely, since you are sharing the hosting with other sites, and your site traffic will slow other sites.

#2 VPS & Dedicated servers

It’s suitable for start-ups with new apps, websites, or eCommerce with hundreds of visitors per day.

VPSs are cheaper than Dedicated servers but their performance is lower.

Pros

- Medium cost ~ ( 25 -200$/month)

- Fixed cost every month

- Full control over everything (programming languages, web-server, DB server, caching…)

- Performance depends on reserved resources for server and network bandwidth.

- Scaling can be done by subscribing to more servers and hiring IT experts to set it up

- Complete, unrestricted access to data

Cons

- An IT expert is required to set up all the software needed to run your projects and manage server security, backups, etc...

- Security and backups should be managed by IT experts you have to find and hire (or you can contact us 😉 )

#3 Cloud Hosting

This is the trend nowadays. Giant tech companies developed it to fulfill their needs, then they started to rent it for the public. it is great with overwhelming features, services, and configurations, which we can not cover in this article. 

However, don’t let the big names of cloud hosting providers like Amazon (AWS), Google (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Oracle, IBM mislead you. If your project belongs to the categories we mentioned in options #1 & #2 then you don’t need cloud hosting thus the money will be better spent on something else.

The number one reason to go with cloud hosting is SCALABILITY. Scalability in simple English means the computer network that runs your project will grow to match the traffic/load of your project instantaneously.

Pros

- Scalability

- ~100% availability ( your site will never go down)

- Reliability ( the project can run from different data centers, Paris, London, Frankfort,  Bahrain, Calfornia, and so on

- Tight security

- So many tools and services to support your project growth

Cons

-Most expensive kind of hosting  +100 $/month

-Cost may vary between months based on the load & traffic

-So many plans and configurations, which is too confusing for small-business owners

Conclusion

There is no golden winner when considering the best hosting options. There is only suitable hosting for your project based on different factors like business requirements, project budget, technical requirements, government regulations, and the current and future status of the project.

Our team of tech experts can guide you through this tough decision to ensure you have the best option for your business.